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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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It could be about programming.dev and lemmynsfw.com stat changes: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4235
TL;DR: By default, Lemmy only counts posts and comments for active users. These instances also started counting the votes. According to Lemmy NSFW admin, there are 3 times more active users with lurkers.
Given all the different ways “active” is defined we may as well just collect all the meanings available.
Mastodon and Twitter etc, for example, count logging on as active.
While I can see the argument for voting, it is qualitatively different from posting/commenting. Knowing both, as well as log in numbers too might make sense. But muddying the waters is probably confusing … though it is interesting that any instance can define what it means by “active”.
I would say that voting isn't actually different from posting/commenting. It's a process whereby a user takes part in a discussion/topic/post. In an ideal world, everyone would post, but we shouldn't act like active people who don't feel like they have anything to say explicitly, aren't here.
Totally agree. Even when two commenters are replying to one another, there is always another layer where they are also addressing everyone in the thread/community/instance/fediverse, which obviously includes lurkers.
The votes shape everything about the platform, so ignoring the lurkers in the stats feels like it's missing an important data point.
Ah, that could be it. I would like other instances to do the same, to me ama voting lurker is an active user
Absolutely. Other social media platforms count as active when we mistakenly enter their sites :)
Okay, that makes more sense, I was trying to figure out what had changed in the past week. I'm very curious to see how that data would look for other servers too. I think it's more logical to count users even if they don't post or comment, because they are still a critical part of the whole ecosystem if they browse and vote regularly. Even without saying anything, their thoughts and opinions help shape the content and discourse through voting.
And for that matter, weekly active users and daily active users would be two other interesting datapoints. You can see the daily and weekly users on the sidebar of instances, but I don't know of any tool/site that scrapes all of that info and displays it in an easily digestible format.
FTFY
if you switch to daily stats you can see a big bump on the 4th, and a smaller bump on the 5th, is that when they made this change?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
I think if you exclude those 2 days we're still on a very very slight downward trend, but once every instance adopts the new method it'll be interesting to see what the trend is after that, it could be that users get tired or posting/commenting and fallback to being lurkers
If you look closely, the downward trend actually stopped before the change in stats. We dipped below 33,000 in mid-November, but then started hovering above 33,000 for multiple weeks until the bump.